I'm still going to withhold any sort of official comment because I feel that the news post is still a bit premature and may have been hastily made. Staff needs to have a good discussion about this I think.
Might be bold of me to say this, but I find the 'retired member' status a little redundant.
While it does award members who have grown to be an important part of the community by acknowledging them and giving them a subforum to communicate with each other, it makes it somewhat harder for newer members to integrate in and feel like they truly belong in here, rather than just short term acquaintances.
Shouldn't a title like that be more like a 'informal status' given by others simply for noticing their presence, rather than a 'solid proof' written in black and white?
E.g. 'Oh, that guy, I've seen him around, I guess he must be an old timer around here' as opposed to 'Oh, that guy, well he has the 'retired member' status so I guess he must be an old timer.'
This is a really complex issue because the site has been around for nearly a decade now.
I like the idea of having an informal status that identifies people based on their longevity, but the social dynamics of how things are currently is pretty complicated and almost justifies having two different sections in its own weird way:
There's a fair number of people in Retired that have been here for more than 5 years, and so the divide between old and new members can be quite large. As someone in Retired put it, there's the "community" (presumably referring to the old community that is somewhat preserved in the Retired section by the people in it), and there's the "Neopets community" (referring to outside of Retired). A lot of people in Retired have grown past Neopets, and so a huge struggle we had was figuring out how to bridge that gap since they now had very little in common with the rest of the community. We never came up with an adequate solution.
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